


Downtime

by pirategirljack



Category: 12 Monkeys (TV)
Genre: F/M, Fluff
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-05-18
Updated: 2015-06-14
Packaged: 2018-03-31 04:42:13
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 4,134
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3964765
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pirategirljack/pseuds/pirategirljack
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is just gonna be a series of fluffy nothings between mission-stuff and between episodes and whatever. Answering the question "what do they do in the downtime?"</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Music

**Author's Note:**

> This one is sometime after the dancing in the museum.

"Well, that's another dead end," Cole said, as tossed the notebook and folder down on the messy table and all but threw himself back in her grandfather's old desk chair. "We haven't found anything useful in hours. Days."

"So let's take a break. Do something else and come back with fresh eyes." She put her own folder down a little more politely, but with no less frustration. He was right; every lead they'd had when he got here had led nowhere, and they had no idea what to do next.

"A break. We don't have time."

"There's always time. Exhaustion and frustration are bad for thinking clearly. I'm gonna make us something to eat."

Cassie stretched, and caught Cole watching her stretch, and laughed at the way he flushed and tried to hide it. He was suddenly very interested in the wall of shelves behind him. That wall was the one she'd claimed for herself, out of all the shelves. Most of them still had the same books they'd had when her grandfather closed up the shop for the last time, but this one bay, the only books were her favorite ones in the lower two shelves. Above that was a whole shelf of old albums, then the rest were a mix of movies and CDs with some random knickknacks. Cole grabbed a handful of CDs and started looking through them. She was momentarily distracted by how many CDs he could grab at once--twice as many as her best, his hands were so much bigger than hers--but she shook herself and turned to go to the kitchen like she should have two minutes ago when she said that's where she was going. That warm was in her belly was probably definitely just hunger and not that alarming growing affection for this strange weird survivor who was equal parts frightening and disarmingly underprepared for everything.

"What are these?" He said.

"CDs--compact disks. Specifically, music ones."

"Music?" He glanced up at her with that same light in his eyes that she's seen in the museum. Where they'd danced. He shuffled through the disks again, looking at them closer. "Do you have a--a player? A thing to play them?"

"Yeah, here." She opened a panel in a nearby cabinet to show the old CD player she'd had for years, and showed him how to turn it on, open the tray, how to put the disk in, what the play and skip and back buttons looked like. "Give it a try."

She'd seen Cole damn near punch a guy's face in, which must've fractured his knuckles, and just brush it off. She watched him shoot a man in the head the second time they met. But the CD player left him hesitating and unsure, and he kept glancing back at her out of the corner of his eye as he made the thing work. She knew he had an excellent memory, she'd seen it at work, so she knew he remembered everything she'd showed him, but still he looked nervous, like he might break it or upset her.

She couldn't help but smile.

He hit the play button, there was the usual spinning-up sound, and some instrumental thing from a soundtrack came on. He listened to it for a while, and soon forgot she was there, so she could watch the wonder and interest and focus and surprise slip over his face like clouds over a summer sky. He smiled and she smiled with him.

He switched it for another that he seemed to have picked more for the bright cover than for anything else, and hit play. This time, pop came out of the speakers, something upbeat and catchy that she listened to when she was jogging, back when she had to jog to stay fit, rather than to get away from danger. He bobbed his head some, tapped his foot, then sort of laughed it off and switched it for a rock album.

This one, a good classic rock mix she kept around for waning the house by, seemed to be what he was looking for. He pushed back from the CD player, and remembered she was there a second before she remembered she was supposed to be doing something. 

"This is a good one."

"Classic," she agreed.

"Dance with me," he said.

"What?" She half-laughed, but, she noticed, she also stepped a little closer. "Now?"

"Why not?"

"No reason, just--"

"Come on. We danced before. It was good. This music sounds like it's made for dancing. Let's dance."

He held out his hand, and she laid hers in it, and he pulled her in like he'd grown up dancing, and she she didn't even try not to laugh this time. Her hand found his shoulder, his hand found her waist, and he led her in a goofy sped-up version of the simple steps she'd taught him.

"We don't have music at home," he said.

"What, at all?"

"Not like this, all recorded and full of different instruments. Sometimes people sing, or one or two simple instruments play, but the music is different. Easier. The same songs everyone knows."

The song changed to something southern rock, and when it came to the chorus, Cole stuttered to a stop for a second, looking up like he could see the music in the air. "I know this one," he said. "It didn't sound like this, all polished, but it had that same tune, I remember these words. Couple of old timers were singing it one time when we were running with some indie scavs and shared a fire with them one night."

"So there is music in your time," Cassie said, and it seemed to remind him that she was there. In his arms. Very close to him. 

He swallowed, and sort of almost pulled her closer. "Not like this."

"No?"

"Not even close," he said, and spun her around and back into dancing. 

They danced through three more songs before her phone binged and brought tem back to their mission. She almost couldn't believe they'd gone half an hour without either of them mentioning why they were here. She pulled away to check her messages and found a response to one of the feelers she'd put out days ago and had given up hearing back on.

"It's Iggy, he says we're looking for a blue car with these plates," she showed him the license plate number, "registered to one of these names."

"Is it a lead?"

"Looks like one."

Cole came closer, that down-to-business frown back on his face, but before he could say anything, he shook out his hand and then rubbed at his wrist. His frown changed then. Turned regretful.

"Time to go?"

"Soon. Few seconds maybe."

"Check out that lead for me?"

"Yeah, course." A pause. "Cassie?"

Her heart fluttered a little at the tentativeness in his voice, and she tried to crush it mercilessly, telling herself they had no time for that. But it stayed there, giddy and warm in her chest. "Yeah?"

"Thanks for the music."

"See you soon?"

"Yeah, see you soon." When he said it, it sounded like something more was in there between the words, and that only made the flutters stronger. He smiled, a real, warm and silly smile, and she managed to smile back before he popped out of existence, back to the future.


	2. Showers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cole likes showers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Unrelated to the other part; you can read them in whatever order. This one is probably set kind of early.

Cole had had showers before. He wasn't a total savage, he was just from what he'd heard people on TV call "a disadvantaged childhood". They weren't talking about the literal apocalypse, of course, no matter what they were talking about, but he liked the sound of the phrase. It sounded official. 

He remembered showers from his time at the orphanage, and different ones from the handful of Foster homes he as Ramse had gone through before everything went to shit and they escaped into the woods with little more plan than "we'll walk to Florida". And they had showers at the Project Splinter facility, wide open ones where the whole wall was was just ugly shower heads and where the water was usually cold because the core didn't have enough power to hear a lot of water when it wasn't needed. He secretly loved those coldest weeks of winter because now he didn't have to be outside in it trying to survive, and Jones let them hear their water.

But Cassie's shower was different than all of those.

He'd arrived at her back door, filthy and bloody and beat up again. It was weird, he'd never really been the sort to be all that concerned about what he looked like as long as he was alive, but there was always this second of nerves before Cassie opened the door. Would she say something? Would she care? She never made him feel bad about whatever state he showed up in, never commented on the mess he made, but everything was so clean here in the past. He tried not to bloody up her furniture too much. 

She she'd patched him up again, and fed him, which he always loved, then handed him a change of clothes and a towel and sent him in here. To get clean. All by himself instead of with everyone else on water day. With actual honest to god hot water.

The tub was tall and stood alone away from the wall on curved metal feet. The curtain, which was itself a luxury, hung on a wide oval bar that hung from the ceiling so the sides billowed out around him when he got in, like some sort of heavenly cocoon. The water knobs weren't too different from the ones at home or the ones on the sink, and he got the shower working easily.

For a long time, he just stood there in the water, sighing, letting the caked dirt and old blood find its own way off and down the drain. Cassie's shower head was big and shiny and all the holes in it sprayed water the way they were supposed to, with exactly the right pressure to roll over the right muscles of his back and neck and ease the aching and tenseness. 

His brain roused him from nearly sleeping, it felt so great, with a very clear image that surfaced with no warning of Cassie in here, totally dude, her long soft hair flattened to her back by the spray of the shower--

"Shit," he said, flushing all at once, and went looking for soap.

There was a clean-looking washcloth on the side of the tub and a bar of soap on a little hanging frame-thing hooked over the side. It was soft and pink, that soap, fine-featured and moisturizing, and it smelled like fruit and flowers. Ramse would never let him live it down if he came home smelling like that, but it was a wonderful smell, and it was Cassie's smell, and he didn't see the point in searching for another bar of soap when this one was right here. The soap at home was either as old as him and hard as a rock, or it was made by one of the scientists in the labs out of rendered cooking grease and home-made lye and was harsh and drying and didn't smell anything like this.

He soaped up every inch of himself with that pink soap, rinsed it all off, and scrubbed everything with that washcloth until he was as pink as the soap and his skin was smoother than he could ever remember being. He'd already been in here longer than any other shower in his life, and the water was still hot and steaming; the window was all frosted over with stream when he got out, and the mirror was so hazed that it fogged right back up again the second he wiped his hand across it.

There was a toothbrush on the side of the sink for him. The towel was soft and sturdy and big enough to wrap all the way around him and stay there. The rug under his feet was soft and plush. Cassie had bought him a stick of deodorant.

All at once, standing in the middle of the steamy room, Cole knew why he was working so hard to save the world. It was for Cassie, and the millions of people who lived with her, of course, it had always been that, but it was this too. Everyday luxuries like soap and toothbrushes and hot water. It was for cheeseburgers and hair brushes and air conditioning in the summer. Humans had spent so much of history building up to this--and the virus had killed all of it, not just the people. Everyone was distracted and moving too fast and too used to ease, but they were also part of a world where you never had to kill someone to be safe in your own bed.

A knock at the door. "Cole? Is everything alright?"

"Yeah. Yeah, it's fine." He opened the door a crack, and the air outside, which hadn't felt cold when he came in, was so much cooler than the steam that he felt a little like he'd been dunked. And he remembered that he was essentially naked when her eyes caught on his bare chest, drifted down, and then snapped up to look at something in the vicinity of his left ear. She blushed, and suddenly he was all warm again.

"You've been in here a while since the water turned off. Are you sure you're alright? Are your stitches holding?"

"I'm fine. I was just--I was sort of blindsided by how different your world is from mine."

Cassie's hair was starting to frizz up from her sleek ponytail from all the steam. He wanted to smooth it back down, but they weren't there yet. He hoped they'd get there.

She chanced a glance at his eyes, still worried, and held his gaze for a while, searching. He wasn't sure if he knew everything she was searching for, but she seemed to find enough to be reassured. Cole liked how she could read him; it made it easier to not talk.

"Get dressed okay?" She said. "No rush. We've got time before we've got to head out. I'll order something for dinner."

"We just had lunch."

She raised an eyebrow, just a little bit of a smile wobbling at the corner of her mouth. "Are you of all people turning down food?"

His stomach growled. He huffed an embarrassed laugh and pushed his damp hair back. "I guess not."

"Come down when you're ready." She squeezed his arm and let her hand drift down to his wrist. She'd never done that before. He watched her go back down the hall before closing the door.

Cole pulled on the clothes she gave him, a pair of pants and a shirt that fit better than most of the clothes he found himself, and smiled before he went back downstairs.


	3. Drinks

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cole and Cassie get cutely drunk

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Probs late in the series. Like, right before the finale?

They’d never gotten drunk before. Not together. Cassie had drunk an awful lot in the space between when he first showed up and smashed a hole in her life and when he’d come back--probably too much, really, and she tried to keep it to a few glasses of whatever she was drinking rather than the drink-to-oblivion she’d been doing when things went wrong. But things were going wrong again, and the Mission had hit a wall, and all she wanted was a drink. But Cole, it turned out, was as enthusiastic about alcohol as he’d been about cheeseburgers and sweet-and-sour, and now it was hours later, and all they were doing was laughing.

It was the best surprised she’d had in ages.

“What’s this thing called? This fruity pink thing?” he asked from inside the cup she handed him.

“A mai tai. Sort of. I don’ really have all the ingredients, but it’s the rum that matters, right?”

“Rum is the best,” he said, a dopey grin on his face and he leaned toward her. “We don’ have rum in the apocalypse,” he said. “Sometimes someone has whiskey, but only, like, Jones or Foster. People who had it before and kept it.” He propped his chin on her shoulder and took another gulp.

“What do you drink then?” she asked, leaning her forehead against his. It was snowing outside, all cold and frigid and lonely, but in here it was warm and bright and she could feel Cole’s beard prickling through her shirt, the warmth of him radiating like...like...like a radiator.

“Moonshine!” he said, raising his cup suddenly and sloshing it--and then immediately trying to catch the slosh and making more of a mess. She laughed, and he looked put out, but it didn’t last long. “Yeah, moonshine. The soldiers made it in the labs when the scientists weren’t there. And then the scientists found out and make it better so we wouldn’t all go blind.”

“Any good?”

“Horrible! But it made the splinters easier to take!”

He leaned in again and looped his free arm around her waist, snuggling her closer and propping himself up on her shoulder again. Drunk-Cole had none of the personal-space that sober-Cole had. And now that she knew he’d been drinking before splinters, she wondered if maybe all that keep-away-from-me-or-I’ll-punch-you was actually just a permanent hangover. The thought made her laugh again, and he started giggling with her, and then they were just a pile of silly glee and closeness.

Cassie looped her arms around his shoulders and pulled him closer. 

He snuggled into her neck. And then made a sad noise when he realized his cup was empty.

“Another?”

“Another!”

What Cassie really wanted now was a pina colada, the girliest drink she could think of, but they didn’t have a blender or a can of coco lopez, so she sloshed some rum into their cups with a pineapple juice from the wetbar. She was glad they’d opted for a higher-end hotel this time so she didn’t have to go anywhere to get this stuff.

She came back to the bed with a cup in either hand, and he patted the spot next to him. He’d moved so they could sit with their backs to the headboard, and she happily cuddled up next to him. He pushed his face into her hair, and for a second, she thought he was going to kiss her and she didn’t mind at all. But instead, he put his cup aside and wrapped his arms all the way around her and just held her.

“This is good,” he said, his words low and slurred. “Gonna stay right here forever. Mission can suck it.”

Cassie did the same. She was so warm and sleepy. This was a good place.

“So good,” she agreed.

“Never gonna let you go.”

“Never, ever,” Cassie, agreed, and drifted off to a smiling sleep a second after Cole’s breathing evened out.


	4. Swings

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cole and Cassie go for a walk

"We need a break," Cole says after the fifth time Cassie has stretched until her back cracked and paced around, and they still didn't know anything new, hadn't made any new connections. "Let's go for a walk."

"Where?"

"Anywhere. Show me around. You said this place was your granddad's, you must know your way around."

Cassie hesitated for a second, then another, and finally he raised his eyebrows and made sort of a "well?" gesture, and finally, she gave in, all at once, and grabbed her coat.

They went out the front door, Cassie locked it, and then they headed off down the block. The sun was starting to go down, the light was veering toward orange, and the clouds streaking the sky over them in long gold-and-pink streamers.

"If you don't look at the people, it almost looks like home," he said, more to break the silence and to jog her out of her thoughts than anything else. It was weird. They’d been working together only a few weeks, and she’d already made it so that he wanted to fill the silence between them. He’d never been that sort of person, a talker, but she was full of words and sometimes he wanted to give some back to her.

Cassie snapped her gaze up to the sky. "I never thought about the apocalypse being pretty."

"It's not all shit," he said. He half smiled, and pushed his hands into his jacket pockets even though it wasn't cold, not really, and definitely not by his standards of cold. Mostly because he wanted to touch her, and that was dumb. "It just mostly is. But sometimes, when you're safe and things are calm and you look up, there's sunsets like this."

She smiled at him, and her shoulders started relaxing down from up around her ears. She took a deep breath, and let it out slowly.

They came to an open grassy place. Sand pit, swings, benches, a climbing frame, all in bright primary colors. A playground. 

Colors like this didn’t exist where he came from.

"I haven't seen one of these that wasn't dangerously rusted out in ages," he said.

"I used to play here when I was a kid," Cassie said, and led him over to the swings, where she settled and started to push herself back and forth with her feet, dragging them and scuffing them through the sand instead of pushing off. "The bookstore got hot in the summer. I wanted to go swimming, always, but there wasn't a pool nearby, so I spent my days here."

Cole cautiously took the swing next to hers. He'd have to be careful if they needed to jump up, make sure his hands were free and his feet were planted...but that sort of thing was rare here, and he didn't think they'd need it. He hoped. He matched his sway to hers, and found it was soothing, about the pace of a heartbeat.

"I never thought of you as a kid before," he said.

She smiled, but it was sad and a little bitter. "I wasn't, really. Not for long. You know the facts--my mom died when I was ten."

"I never thought about what that meant, either. I never knew mine."

She was quiet for a few moments, and he looked at the sky shading toward pink and red, the last of the gold settling in her hair. He tried not to watch the colors changing how she looked, and instead looked at them changing how the world looked. They were alone in the park. Streetlamps were coming on. 

“What was it like, learning about me? In the future?”

He shrugged one shoulder. “Boring.”

She lifted an eyebrow at him, the way she had when he’d said she looked like a woman in a magazine, and he knew he’d left out too many words for his meaning to make it through. “Not you--the researching. Lots of dull-ass files to get through, most of them totally unrelated to you, but from places we knew you’d be, or things we’d thought we’d find a mention.” He glanced at her sideways. “You weren’t hard to find.”

“I wasn’t?”

“Until I was actually here. It was...disorienting. Too many people. Took too long. It’s different on the ground.”

“It always is.”

Something in her voice caught at him. “We can do this, Cassie.”

“Can we?”

He reached out and caught her chain, pulled them both to a stop...and left his hand there. “We can.”

“We don’t know anything about anything. Every time we find something out, what we’re really finding out is how little we actually know about everything. We’re spinning our wheels and not getting anywhere.”

He wanted to say something encouraging that would take that frown off her face. He wanted to tell her what she needed to hear. Cole wasn’t the person for things like that. He pulled her a little closer by that chain, studied her face as the last of the light made her glow like she had a light inside her. “We just haven’t found the right piece yet. It’s like this in my time, too. It always settles out eventually.”

“When?”

“When it does.” He set her swinging again, and matched his own swing to hers. They both looked at the stars, just coming out. “Right now, we’ve got a minute to rest, to regroup. To unwind. We’re no use to anyone all wound up and fried.”

She looked at him like she thought he was crazy, but he only caught her chain again and dragged her swing along with his as he kicked off. A few fireflies came out with the stars, flickering on and off, on and off. 

“It’s a beautiful night,” Cassie said, at long last.


End file.
